2020 Volume 61 Issue 2 Pages 321-328
The purpose of this study is to help improve teaching strategies in primary science education. One strategy is to encourage advance understanding of the outline of the learning content by having the students read the text before the lesson, because the preceded context enables them to more easily understand the contents immanent in the lesson. Another strategy is to enable the children to form hypotheses before engaging in experiments. In order to allow for the formation of hypotheses through prior knowledge, the “basic experiments” were placed before the learning procedures of the textbook which contains the experiments. A practical study of “Magnetism Generated by Electric Currents” using this strategy was carried out in a 5th grade class in elementary school. The results of the study are following; 1. Armed with the prior context, the children could behave competently in the lesson. They could easily find their learning problem in the scientific text and they also understood the purpose and meaning of the experiments shown in the textbook. 2. The prior knowledge from “basic experiments” enabled the children to think more logically and more readily form hypotheses. Formulating hypotheses by themselves helped make their experiments more meaningful. The cyclic interpretation between “basic experiments” added in this study and the experiments from the textbook made the students’ understanding of the magnetism caused by electricity more certain.
